


time to crack another smile

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: o blessed gabriel, intercede for us [4]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Chronic Illness, Collector Ship Mission, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Missing Scene, Platonic Bed Sharing, Swearing, emotionally fraught silences and honest conversations without plot, extrapolating some stuff about Vrolik's because I have actual medical knowledge, whatever PWP's nonsexual platonic cousin is called
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 11:48:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17425307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: God knows Joker doesn’t need to be heckling Commander Shepard after the day she’s had.  Don’t get him wrong, it was pretty fucking stressful on the ship, but also—  Hey, listen, he only got shot at twice today.  By a very big gun, sure, but only twice.  He’s not entirely sure of numbers, but he’s pretty sure Shepard hit a higher count than twice.It's been hours since they escaped the Collector ship.  On the downside, Joker is awake and hurting and he almost had to leave Shepard to die again today.  On the upside, Shepard's not dead.





	time to crack another smile

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I'm like...halfway through Mass Effect 2 and I have returned with MORE FEELINGS, this time about the way Joker's voice cracks when he says "I can't lose another Normandy" on the Collector ship mission and obviously actually means "I can't leave you to die again." I love that I can be best friends with Joker in the second game, there is no plot here, only introspection and emotional silences and platonic bed sharing.
> 
> Oh, also Vrolik syndrome is technically another name for osteogenesis imperfecta Type II, however, with the bone grafts that allow him a higher degree of stability, I'm assuming that Joker is functionally on the more severe end of the Type I spectrum with slightly atypical presentation, at this point in time.
> 
> Title is from Tragedy + Time, by Rise Against.

Joker is so fucking tired.  It’s been maybe six hours since they abandoned the Collector ship.  Everything hurts, the bone grafts holding his legs together setting up a sullen mutter of complaint after the G-forces he subjected the ship to, pulling evasive maneuvers.  Artificial gravity is great, under most circumstances, but sometimes he thinks he should just turn the fucking generator off and tell everyone to strap themselves to the walls.  It’d probably save him a lot of trouble in the long run.

On the other hand, Shepard doesn’t have a chair in the cockpit and he’d hate to deprive her of the ability to hover over his shoulder like the specter of death or some shit.

Well, maybe that’s not fair.  He doesn’t really mind having her there, when shit’s about to hit the fan in the _worst way_ , like some kind of goddamn rabbit’s foot.  Shepard talks about her shit luck a lot—and Joker’s not arguing, her talent for trouble is _absolutely_ unparalleled in his experience—but something about having her there makes his most daring maneuvers, his stupidest ideas, his most unquestionably idiotic plans, work out okay.  It’s like the willpower that brought down a Reaper and saved the Citadel is strong enough to warp reality around him for the few seconds he needs to get them all out.

After all, he thinks with a grim little snicker, limping out of the elevator, you know when she _wasn’t_ right on his shoulder during the entirety of a disaster?  When his ship got blown up and she—

So maybe the gravity generators can stay.

Or maybe he can hit Tali up for some super intense mag boots so Shepard can stay in the cockpit without gravity while Joker does some dumb shit.

He walks into a bulkhead, and that’s what finally tips him that he’s not on the crew deck.  See, the bulkhead’s only got the one door, and even though Joker’s leaving better than a double shift right now, coming off an adrenaline high that could give Sovereign a hard time, he’s pretty sure the crew deck’s corridor has—more.

Joker performed a fucking miracle today _thank you very much_ , he is not obligated to know things like how many doors are in a hallway he’s _not even in_.

The muscles in his right leg—the one that was shattered in the escape pod, when…before—are starting to shake, and Joker thinks a little bitterly that he should have taken it in the teeth and brought his crutches to the deck today.  It had been looking like a bad day for his legs when he got up, but he sort of assumed he’d be spending a few hours in the cockpit and then limp back to his bunk and collapse, and it hadn’t really seemed worth it to carry the crutches around for that.

Well.  That’ll fucking show him.

“ _Fuck_ the Illusive Man,” Joker says aloud, leaning against the bulkhead.  Just for a minute, just until his legs are steady again.  Then he’ll lurch back into the elevator and go the hell to bed.  God knows he doesn’t need to be heckling Commander Shepard after the day she’s had.  Don’t get him wrong, it was pretty fucking stressful on the ship, but also—

Hey, listen, he only got shot at twice today.  By a very big gun, sure, but only twice.  He’s not entirely sure of numbers, but he’s pretty sure Shepard hit a higher count than _twice_ , if the steady stream of “fucking _shit_ , I hate these bastards, _get the fuck down or I’ll shoot you myself_ ” he’d listened to over the comms was anything to go by.

Even Grunt had looked pretty tired by the time the shuttle made dock.  Joker doesn’t want to think about what kind of fight tires out a krogan.

Joker takes a test step away from the bulkhead, and—his right leg gives out altogether.  He barely manages to change the direction of his stumble so he crashes back into the bulkhead rather than straight onto the floor.

“Shit,” Joker says.

Chakwas is going to give him that fucking _disappointed_ look if he’s managed to hurt his damn knee again.  And, you know, normally doctors can kiss his ass and take their disappointed looks with them, but Chakwas is actually sort of like a friend first, doctor second, even though she’s been dragging him through recovery from the grafts kicking and screaming.  She won’t _lecture_ him or anything, she’ll just frown mildly at him and fix his leg and ask about his sister, and somehow Joker will end up feeling so fucking guilty about it that he uses his crutches for a few days without her even bringing it up.

And then he’ll feel a little better and he’ll be annoyed about it.

He’s so busy scowling down at the floor, thinking about the inevitability of it all, that he doesn’t even hear the door’s quiet chime and hiss of pneumatics.

“Hey, I heard—Joker?  Are you okay?”

He blinks into the green eyes of his commander, and somehow, stupidly, the first thing he says is, “If Chakwas finds out you’re still awake, she’s going to filet you and let Gardner serve you for dinner.”

Shepard cracks a smile at that, a crooked little smirk.  “Yeah, I already got my orders.  ‘No foolish running around for at least a few days,’” she says in a passable imitation of Chakwas’ delicate accent.  “Apparently the trauma kit in my armor isn’t magic and I shouldn’t act like it is, or someday I’m just going to fall apart.”  Her amusement fades, and leaves some kind of profound, bone-deep exhaustion in its wake, something that draws her face thin and haggard, makes the slow-healing scars on her face look deeper than they have in a long time.  “Are you all right, Joker?  You look kind of—tilted.”

“A blistering insight from the hero of humanity,” Joker says dryly.  “I’m fine.  Looks like I just put my system through a few too many G’s today and now my leg isn’t really working right.  I just need a minute and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Come in,” Shepard offers.  “I’m not sleeping, and getting off your feet might help.  You want to see my fish?”

“You keep fish on this thing?”

“It’s—kind of lonely up here,” Shepard says.  She hesitates over the words, looking away from him, and Joker wonders if she’s telling the truth because she wants someone to know, or if it’s just because she’s too goddamn tired to keep up a good front.  Either way—

Shepard’s a fairly short woman, maybe five-three or five-four, but Joker never thinks of her as _small_.  She’s built on lines that are leaner than they seem like they should be, to support the kind of soul that lives in there, but she’s a soldier and she looks the part, a fighter with muscles cording every bone, she looks like the kind of person who once beat a krogan to death with the butt of a rifle because she was out of bullets.  Garrus has probably told that story to everyone who will listen three or four times.  Joker would almost literally die before he admitted that he kind of loves hearing it—God knows Shepard never tells stories of the shit she did without help.  Since Shepard is historically pretty mediocre with a sniper rifle, Garrus has a _lot_ of those stories and Joker knows for a fact that he’s been spending them pretty freely as currency to make nice with the Cerberus crew.

The point is, Shepard’s not really a tiny woman, height notwithstanding.  No one could ever mistake her for a child, or even a teenager, not even an alien without a good handle on human ages, the kind of alien who uses height as their absolute marker for adulthood.  Shepard looks like she’s lived every day of her thirty-ish years—do you even _count_ the years she spent dead? He’s not sure—with shallow lines around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes even though her hair is still as red as ever.  Normally she radiates energy and determination that could swallow the sun if she wanted, and is certainly enough to give the impression that she’s bigger and badder than anything else in the room.

Right now, she looks—

Small.  She’s not even dressed in her usual uniform, just a pair of black pants and a black tank top that displays further scarring on her right shoulder and chest.  She’s barefoot, and it's odd to see the delicate arch of her feet rather than the ever present chunky black of combat boots. Her arms are folded, pressed against her ribs, and she’s leaning against the door almost as heavily as Joker’s leaning against the bulkhead, and the circles under her eyes are so deep they’re _blue_. 

“Okay,” Joker says, without really meaning to.  He pushes himself away from the bulkhead, meaning to limp over to the door, but his right leg is still reluctant to take his weight, and he only manages a step before he stops and grits his teeth.  “I—might need a hand.”

“All right,” Shepard says, and slips herself under his left arm like he doesn’t weigh a damn thing, like this is normal.  Although, he guesses that she dragged Grunt out of the line of fire today, so maybe it is, for her.  She’s casual about it, knows how to match the pace he can manage and doesn’t say anything about it, just deposits him on one side of her bed and squints judiciously at the clock on her bedside table.  The total lack of attention to the fact that she has to carry her fucking pilot around, the way she treats it like something she does for everyone, is the only reason Joker bites back the tide of bitterness and doesn’t take the first cheap shot that comes to mind. 

“Careful, Commander,” Joker says, with some weak humor, as he takes one pillow and stuffs it under his right knee, legs outstretched on the bed in front of him.  “Someone’ll talk.”

Shepard cocks an eyebrow at him, wandering over to the fish tank.  Normally this would be where she threw out some joke, some flirty line, but instead she just waves a hand.  “I’m too fucking tired for people to talk,” she says.  There’s a switch in the wall, and when she palms it, a fluttering rain of food lands on the water in the tank.  “ _They_ can spend two hours creeping through a Collector ship and then another hour running for their lives and see how down to fuck they are afterward.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Joker says, tipping his head back against Shepard’s headboard and closing his eyes.

“Take your boots off, you monster,” Shepard adds, and then she flops down on the bed beside him, completely without ceremony, face first.  “Fuck, I’m tired,” she says into her mattress.

“It’s been six hours, why the hell aren’t you asleep?” Joker asks, clumsily wrestling his boots off and dropping them obediently beside the bed.  He’s pretty sure he already knows the answer, and the look Shepard gives him as she rolls onto her back confirms it.

“It’s been six hours,” she repeats, in her most snide tone of voice, “why the hell aren’t you in your bunk?”

“Some of us actually work on this ship, Commander, I have a job.”

“I know for a fact that your shift ended before we even docked with the Collector ship, don’t try your shit with me, Moreau.”  Shepard stares up at her ceiling, eyes open and weary.  “I can’t sleep,” she admits finally. 

“Yeah,” Joker sighs.  “Me neither.”

They sit there in silence for a minute, then for longer.  Joker’s never been in Shepard’s quarters before, not on this ship, not since she came back.  It’s still military-clean, without a lot in the way of personal possessions.  Shepard doesn’t accumulate stuff easily, Joker’s noticed that before—on the first Normandy, everything she stored in her quarters could feasibly have been packed away in a single mid-size duffel bag.  She has a little more now, because she has more space, and because as far as he can tell Cerberus has been trying to press the point, but mostly the room is as pristine as it was when it was being built.

Mostly, Shepard has decorations.  She has model ships mounted in a glass case, a ranging from the first Normandy all the way up to a terrifyingly accurate model of Sovereign.  She has her fish, which, Joker has to admit, are very soothing to watch.  He dimly recalls something about watching fish swim being good for blood pressure, lowering anxiety, and he wonders if that’s why she keeps them—to calm her.  The only thing in the room that doesn’t match the polished professional look of the place is a battered helmet on the table in the corner, below the model ships.  It’s black and looks blasted, with a damaged faceplate and white lettering at the temple that’s barely legible— _N7_ , with a red stripe.

“Hey, Shepard,” Joker says when he’s sure his voice won’t crack hopelessly.

“Yeah,” Shepard says, and her voice sounds _colorless_ with exhaustion, like all the life’s been drained out of her throat.

“Is that—is that your old helmet?”

“Yes,” she says without looking away from the ceiling.  “I found it at—at the crash site.”

“Shep,” Joker says, ragged, and she shakes her head, glass-green eyes still open and dry and fixed, and he doesn’t finish his sentence because—

Because he was _there_ , he was the pilot who took her out there, the one who sent out the shuttle that took her to the ground, and she spent hours in the snow, silent over the comms except for the occasional announcement that she’d found another dog tag.  Joker spent the entire time she was down there not-quite-fiddling with the trigger to call her, torn between the desire to give her this, a moment alone in that graveyard, and the _need_ to hear her voice.  She’d returned to the ship and thanked him quietly for taking her there, with a rough hug so tight it had hurt, clinging to him like he was the last lifeboat in rough seas.  Joker, for once, had hugged her back without complaint, until she seemed ready to walk out of the shuttle bay, and he’d sworn Chakwas to absolute silence when she fixed the two ribs that Shepard’s grip had subluxated.

And because Shepard looks brittle, now, like the wrong word might make her take a swing at him—or worse, start crying.

“I knew I should’ve made you pick up some more crew before you went out there,” Joker says instead, not looking at her.  “You don’t do as good a line in lone-wolfing it as you think you do.”

Shepard huffs out a sound that’s almost like a laugh.

“You don’t give me orders, Joker,” she says softly. 

“As far as I can tell, nobody’s successfully given you an order—ever, maybe.”

“I follow my orders.”

“You mutinied and stole a grounded ship, and that’s just the _start_.”

Shepard rolls her head a little, a noncommittal gesture.  “Maybe so.  You helped, though.”

“Yeah, I think my file says ‘authority problems’ more than it says my name.  Don’t exactly make me unique here, though, you sort of specialize in that.  Half your crew is ready to buck orders and go fully off the rails at all times, if they haven’t already.”  That gets him a real scoff, but she doesn’t argue. 

The silence they settle back into is a little easier, a little less mutually miserable, or feels that way to him.  But then Shepard speaks again, in the same quiet voice, and Joker’s heart drops like a stone.

“What happened to your leg, Joker?”

For a moment, he draws a blank.  He doesn’t—he doesn’t know what to say.  The day of the crash is a hazy nightmare, full of pain and grief, half-remembered and half-constructed from what he learned later.  He remembers parts with the clarity of dread, of living a moment and thinking _I’ll never stop seeing this_.  Shepard hauling him up and pulling him through the burning ship.  Shepard shoving him into the pod.  Shepard slamming the eject button.  The sight of Normandy’s hull, shattered and burned.

Being pulled from the pod and asking, _demanding_ , to be told which pod got Shepard, which pod brought her back, where she was, and seeing cold horror wash over every face.

It’s been a fucking while since he thought about something as fundamentally unimportant as his legs on that day, in the shadow of all that.

“It, uh,” Joker finally says, slowly, trying to find a way to say it that won’t end with Shepard being a dumb shit and blaming herself, “it was the acceleration in the escape pod,” he says.  “As far as anyone can tell, I was thrown into the wall when the pod ejected.  It broke my left leg in two places and my right in thirteen.  Broke my arm, too, but that was the pod docking, not the ejection.  The bone grafts helped a lot but—I mean, still my legs.”

Shepard seems to get what he’s saying, and nods, still looking at the ceiling.

“That’s—a lot of breaks,” she says, and Joker doesn’t say that actually it’s pretty good for a guy with Vrolik’s who got slammed into a bulkhead.  “I’m--”

“You got your ass spaced saving my life, and, for the record, I was really fucking pissed at you for a _while_ about that shit, but if you’re about to apologize I’m going to get up and limp the fuck down to my own bed.”

Shepard’s mouth closes with a snap.

“That’s what I thought,” Joker grumbles, and shuffles a little further down the wall, so that he’s slumped comfortably against it, knee still propped up on the pillow.  “Gabriel Shepard, resident moron.  I can’t believe the fate of the universe is in the hands of a goddamn idiot.”

“I’d say it’s in the hands of quite a few idiots, give us all some credit,” Shepard says dryly.  “But it worked out okay last time.”

“Seems unfair.”  Joker pauses for a moment and adds, “Tali’s pretty smart, don’t lump her in with the rest of us.  No idea what she’s doing here.”

The laugh that bubbles up from Shepard’s chest is just a short bark, but she looks surprised to hear it.  Joker pretends that he hasn’t noticed and carries on.

“Maybe it’s ‘cause she joined up with you so young,” he says, fake thoughtful.  “Probably scrambled her brains.  You fucking broke her common sense forever.”  Shepard is still laughing, a gasping ragged sound as she presses her hands to her face, but the worst of the tension is finally bleeding out of where it’s lived in her ribs since she invited Joker in, and he keeps going in his flattest tone.  “You’re going to be lucky if the quarian fleet doesn’t ban you from talking to their kids ever again.  I guess if you keep wandering up to random quarians and handing them large sums of money to solve their problems they might just take you back to the flotilla and adopt you, though.”

“That’d show the Council,” Shepard chokes out, and Joker chuckles a little as she drags in a few more breaths.  She sounds almost hysterical, wheezing with laughter, but honestly he’ll take it over the glassy exhausted fragility of before.  “They can deal with their own goddamn apocalypse, I’m taking my guns and I’m going to solve problems for the quarian admiralty from now on.  Maybe _they’ll_ believe me.”

Shepard goes on laughing, the sound thinning out until she’s almost giggling, while Joker gives up on sitting down and opts to slide all the way down, lying down shoulder-to-shoulder with her.  The bed is barely wide enough for the pair of them, but it’s comfortable, more firm than soft but also clearly better made than the crew bunks.  He can feel Shepard shaking with laughter at his side.

Eventually, she gasps herself into silence, and he can’t tell if the tears she’s wiping from her face are from laughing or crying.  Either way, he feels her press her foot lightly against his left shin, like a thank you.

“What was the Collector ship like?” Joker asks quietly.

Shepard hums thoughtfully, her voice a bit wracked from her fit of laughter.  “It was—organic.  It looked like a beehive.  Grown, not built.  And—the Collectors—it’s not good, Joker,” she says grimly.  “That’s what they’ve got in mind for us.  It’s worse than dying.”

Joker nods.  “You were going to tell me to leave you there,” he says.  It’s not a question.  “When you thought you weren’t going to make it in time, you were going to tell me to leave the away team there and get everyone else out.”

“Yes, I was.”

“You can’t ever ask me to leave you to die again,” Joker says, and his voice is fucking _shaking_ , so hard that Shepard must be able to _feel_ it, but she doesn’t stop him or say anything, just lies there beside him, quiet and weary and attentive.  “I’m not fucking around.  I did it once—I know it wasn’t my fault, I know I couldn’t have stopped you, but you _can’t ask me to do that shit again_.  You got it?”

“I’m not promising you that, Joker.”

Before he can say anything else, Shepard reaches up, palm extended toward her ceiling and fingers splayed as if she’s reaching up toward the roof of the vast cavern she had described over the comms, the one pebbled with cocoons, chrysalises, terrible transformation chambers.  Then she closes her fist and lets it drop.

“I’m going to stop them,” she says, and—that’s her.  That’s the Shepard that dragged the Normandy across the galaxy hunting the geth, the Shepard who came back to life and killed her way out of a secure facility and took on another impossible task because she was needed.  It’s the most _her_ Joker’s seen her since she got back from the Collector ship.  “The Reapers don’t fucking get us.  They don’t get to enslave us, they don’t get to turn us into monsters.  I’m going to stop them.  The Collectors—it’s a goddamn mercy kill at this point.  They’ve been twisted so far into what the Reapers want them to be that it’s going to be a fucking kindness to take them out.  And then I’m going to seal the Reapers so far into dark space that even they’re going to die of old age before they reach another mass relay.  Any price—even my life—I’m ready to pay it, if it means I stop this.”

“You’d better fucking _try_ , then,” Joker says.  His voice is vicious even to his own ears.  “You tell me you’ll try not to give me that order, and I’ll back you every step of the way, Commander.”

Shepard sighs and bumps his shin again.  “Okay.  I’ll try.”

“Okay,” Joker says, the trembling in his chest and the tightness in his throat starting to ease, slowly.  He’s only just noticing them now, now that they’re starting to fade.  “Thank you, Commander.”

Shepard scoffs again, and just like that the air is easy to breathe again.  “That’s real sweet, but you can drop the military routine.  Fuck knows I’ve been calling you Joker and hassling you to be my friend since day one.”

“Yeah, you were a fucking pain in my ass.”

“And yet here we are,” Shepard says, and she yawns.

“You should sleep.  You look like the living dead.”

“You’re not funny,” she says, but her eyes are closed.  “You can stay here if you want.  I could grab your crutches for you tomorrow, if you still need them.”

“Thanks,” Joker says, and doesn’t get up. 

He _should_ get up.  He wasn’t lying when he said that people would talk.  It’s a small ship, people talk _a lot_.  People already talk about how much time their commander spends sitting on the railing of the main battery, or else her vigilant search for good sniper rifles, and quite frankly Joker doesn’t want to get in the middle of anything, even by accident.  Shepard deserves to be happy.  Even if it’s with a turian who’s only just gotten the stick out of his ass.

Also, Joker is tired enough to admit that he’s a little scared of Shepard, and there are lots of people to start rumors with who don’t make a habit of fighting thresher maws, which.  Shepard is easily one of the top five most stunning people Joker knows, and normally he likes redheads as much as the next person, but apparently his type is _unlikely to come home covered in thresher venom_.  He’s not looking to change that.

So he should get up, is the point.

Joker stifles a yawn himself and says, “Hey, robot on my ship?”

 “I am not a robot, Mister Moreau, but yes?”

“Kill the lights in here.”

“Of course,” EDI says, and lowers the lights until the room is only illuminated by the slightly ghostly orange glow of Shepard’s clock.  “I have muted all announcements or comm pings to this room except for Commander Shepard’s emergency channel, and will maintain radio silence for the next ten hours.  Mister Moreau?”

“Yeah, robot.”

“Thank you for ensuring that the Commander is all right.”

“Kill the clock too, can you?”

“Of course, Mister Moreau.”

In the dark, Shepard’s breathing is slow and deep, and when Joker closes his eyes, for the first time in a while, he doesn’t see anything but blackness.

**Author's Note:**

> Stay tuned for more Content because I Have Got Some Feelings, and also I named my Shep Gabriel and decided to romance Garrus LONG before I learned about the whole Archangel thing, so. I'm practically legally obligated to have Feelings about that. Also, I have feelings [on Tumblr](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/) so hit me up.


End file.
